If Britain wants a say in global affairs, it needs muscle

Swingeing defence cuts threaten our standing in the world to a dangerous
degree.

The verdict on the defence review, from Britain’s most senior officer, was stark: “Time after time,” he wrote, “the Services were told that the financial dangers to the country were greater than the military ones. The Government seemed unable to face the fact that every million spent now reduced the chance of war – and that if war came… the cost would be much greater.”

The author of this rebuke was not, as it happens, General Sir David Richards, but the long-forgotten Lord Chatfield, in 1935. In the nick of time, his argument prevailed, giving Churchill the means to fight in 1940.

In its report today, the defence select committee’s criticism of the Coalition’s Strategic Defence and Security Review is just as pointed. Employing identical logic to the 1930s Treasury, the SDSR scrapped HMS Ark Royal and our Harrier aircraft because, “in the short term”, it judged them unnecessary. Five months later, in Libya, we found that we badly needed both. We were forced to fly sorties from Italy. But as Admiral Giuseppe de Giorgi has explained, the Italians do not see their homeland as an aircraft carrier. They are using their (two) carriers and Harriers because the planes were purpose-built, can be scrambled quickly and cost a tenth as much (per hour deployed) as a Typhoon and an eighth as much as a Tornado.

For us, the issue is academic: the day after the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, correctly stated that we couldn’t carry on the Libyan operation as it was indefinitely, someone ordered that our Harriers – upgraded at a cost of £1 billion – be sold to the US for vastly less, for spares. The facts are so weirdly perverse that there must be some other explanation.

For the sake of relatively small savings, the SDSR has ground to dust most of the key enablers for the sovereign projection of British power. The head of procurement at the Ministry of Defence reports that the £38 billion black hole inherited from Labour is actually £5.5 billion larger. MPs doubt whether “Force 2020” – the SDSR blueprint – can be achieved on present budgets. So more cuts are needed. The Tornado force that was suddenly retained last October, at a cost of £5 billion more than the Harriers, will likely be axed anyway. The SDSR has also seriously abraded our defence industry, to the extent that the revival spurred by Chatfield in the 1930s would be impossible to achieve now.

In short, in only eight months, the Coalition has discarded the aura of hard power without which Britain’s other inherited advantages as a global player are simply limp. To think that “soft power” is an alternative is to display a gross ignorance of history. So we are in deep double jeopardy. We lack a coherent, credible grand strategy to deter, pre-empt or defend ourselves against the unknown, or to project our national interests. Scrapping Ark Royal was the clearest possible signal of this. As a senior Chinese officer has said, “all the great nations in the world own aircraft carriers – they are symbols of a great nation”. That’s why China has just commissioned its first. By the same token, to opt for a “carrier gap” of some years is to abandon your responsibilities.

The select committee severely criticises such thinking, not least because it shows absolutely no understanding of realpolitik. Weakening yourself invites greater risk, not less. “If you desire peace, prepare for war” was the Romans’ maxim. Or, as Trotsky observed, you may not be interested in war, but war is very interested in you.

So what should we do? In an incisive new pamphlet, The Tipping Point – which is introduced by Bob Ainsworth, the former Labour defence secretary – Bernard Jenkin MP argues that the collision of unexpected strategic shocks and swingeing defence cuts demands that a choice be made openly. If the Coalition’s policy is that Britain should be merely a middle-ranking EU state, trying to shake off its last vestiges of greatness and deliberately unable to field a full spectrum of hard power, that must be declared. Then try to win the case in the country – although I suspect the result would be akin to the AV referendum. The alternative is to reverse the choice to shrink defence spending, and cut lesser spending priorities instead (as well as giving the MoD a radical spring-clean).

Wise governments know that defence is the special case: it is the area where the proper level of spending is determined not by us, but by those who wish us harm. Given the mess we find ourselves in, the most dangerous cuts must be corrected. Because we cannot do without them, some Nimrod MR4A capabilities are already being expensively bought back. Since we lack the means to make our new aircraft carriers instantly credible, we should put catapults and arrestors on both craft and, like the savvy Australians, buy F-18 Super Hornets – even secondhand from the US. Likewise, we must rescind all reductions in our brigade-strength amphibious forces, which before the SDSR were the only such capability outside the US. Savings could come from reinstating the deletion of the obsolescent Tornado force.

This programme would begin to repair Britain’s damaged global status, and let us claw our way back towards the full spectrum of hard power that has, as the Service chiefs told the select committee, been lost. Either we do this now, humbly, by choice – or we will be compelled to do it by events. The courageous Lord Chatfield entitled his autobiography It Might Happen Again. He was not wrong. The Coalition has put us here. Let it choose.

Professor Gwyn Prins is the director of the Mackinder Programme at the London School of Economics